HAWTHORNE
339
that to be removed from one's fellow-beings was to commit a mortal
sin. His ambivalence is expressed in the Preface to
Twice-Told Tales.
He tells us-it is touching to hear him say it-that the stories are
written in "the style of a man of society," that they are "his attempt to
open an intercourse with the world." Yet Hawthorne's impulse to
privacy is definitive of his genius. We think so and he thought so.
The delicate, the fragile, the evanescent, all that could not survive the
public touch or gaze, made his conception of success in art. Of his
tales he says that "they have the blue tint of flowers that blossomed
in too retired a shade- the coolness of meditative habit which diffuses
itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch." The flower
was for him the perfect symbol of the created work: he was at pains
to revise his ancient family name so that it would be more precisely
that of a beautiful flower-bearing tree, its blossoms delicate and brief,
its integrity and isolation enforced by its thorns or spines.
It is all too possible that in having made Hawthorne public, in
having busied ourselves to discover that he is a Question, which then
we must bestir ourselves to answer, we have lost much of the charm
and fragrance which may well be his essence. James was much en–
gaged by the beauty of Hawthorne's work, by its textures and hue, of
which he speaks not so much with critical admiration as with personal
delight. Of this surface esthetic the modern critics of Professor Dono–
hue's volume say little. Their concern is with an esthetic of depth,
an esthetic of the arrangement of quasi-doctrinal significances. One
cannot have everything, but whoever has first read Hawthorne in
childhood-James makes a point of his having done so--will be in–
clined to feel that something he once knew is missing, something that
spoke to him, and very movingly, before ever ambiguity was a word,
some wind or music of unparticular significance that had its abode in
the forests and haunted The Notch and played around The Great
Stone Face.
It is a loss, but no doubt we must teach ourselves to sustain it
cheerfully. For how else are we to deal with Hawthorne than in the
public way we do deal with him? He belongs in the canon of our
spiritual heritage, and how else is one to impart that heritage, how
else is one to be a serious critic or a university teacher, if he is not as
active
as he may be in response to his subject? And if one perhaps
goes on to think of his profession as having a more than pedagogic
